Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (85 page)

And neither can I—because now I must immerse myself in the living, prancing, preening Human Context of a Preterhuman world of speed, money, and passion ... “Polo Is My Life,” which
I can finish by Christmas, once I get my staff/support system in place.

As a matter of fact I think I can send you a few chapters of “Polo” by Labor Day, now that I finally have time to work on it, and a professional reason to hang around Polo practice with the big-time Argentines & their sloe-eyed trophy bimbos is precisely what I need to get myself in gear.

R.S.V.P.

Hunter
HST

Letter from HST to JSW, September 22, 1994

Garden City Hotel
Please help me
I’m sick

Dear Jann,

Here is a nine (9) page running start on our Polo Project and The Nature & Fate of Democracy. Note Polo Was My Life. Details enc. You’re welcome.

Tobias will have a clean copy to you before ten. He has been a big help in many ways & I think we should give him a raise ... Corey should be fired. He went crazy out here with a sex doll & almost got me evicted . . .

Bob Love is nutty as a fruitcake if he thinks we’ll have 20 real pages on this thing by “the end of the week.” The BIG GAME is not until Sunday, & I’ll be a victim of
Rigor Mortis
by then.

The U.S. Polo Open is the dullest spectacle since Boss Tweed died of old age with all his children watching. They were forced to, and the death took many weeks.

That is how I feel now, in this horrible morgue of a hotel. I will flee to the city tomorrow, or maybe tonight. My book has moved up to No. 13 on the NYT list and my daily expenses have increased accordingly. I can no longer live on this meager $200 a day Per Diem. [
sic
]

Okay. Let us speak. Later.

HST

*** I think this one should go as a
Memo from the Sports Desk
. We would be fools to try to bloat it up to 15K words.

December 15, 1994

Queer for Power, Slave to Speed. . .Adventures in the Pony Business

Arms, my only ornament—my only rest, the fight.

—Cervantes,
Don Quixote

I

Polo meant nothing to me when I was young. It was just another sport for the idle rich—golf on horseback—and on most days I had better things to do than hang around in a flimsy blue-striped tent on a soggy field far out on the River Road and drink gin with teenage girls. But that was the old days, and I have learned a lot since then. I still like to drink gin with teenage girls on a Sunday afternoon in horse country, and I have developed a natural, friendly feeling for the game.

Which is odd, because I don’t play polo, and I hate horses. They are dangerously stupid beasts with brains the size of cue balls and hoofs that can crush your whole foot into bone splinters just by accidentally stepping on your toe. Some will do it on purpose. I have been on extremely mean and stupid horses that clearly wanted to hurt me. I have been run against trees by the bastards, I have been scraped against barbed-wire fences and bitten on the back of the head for no reason . . .

At the age of five, I got trapped in a stall for forty-five minutes with a huge horse named Buddy, who went suddenly crazy and kicked himself to death with terrible shrieking noises while I huddled in the urine-soaked straw right under his hoofs.

My uncle Lawless, a kindly dairy farmer, was flogging the brute across the eyes with a two-by-four and trying to get a strangle rope around his neck, but the horse was too crazy to deal with. Finally, in desperation, he ran back to the house and got a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun—which he jammed repeatedly against the horse’s lips and teeth until the beast angrily bit down on the weapon and caused both barrels to fire at once.

“So much for that one,” he said as he dragged me out from under the dead animal’s body. I was covered with blood and hot, steaming excrement. The brute had evacuated its bowels at the moment of death . . .

No one seemed to know why it happened. “It was a suicide,” the vet said later, but nobody believed him. Uncle Lawless loved animals, and he was never able to reconcile murdering that horse with his basic Christian beliefs. He sold his farm and went into the real estate business in southern Indiana, and finally he went insane.

The main problem with horses is that they are too big to argue with when they’re angry—or even bitchy, for that matter, and highbred horses are notorious for their bitchiness. Which might be cute or fey in a smaller animal, but when a beast that weighs 1,200 pounds goes crazy with some kind of stupid pique or jealousy in a room not much bigger than the handicapped stall in the Denver airport men’s room, bad things will happen to anybody who tries to argue with it: fractured skulls, broken legs, split kidneys, spine damage, and permanent paralysis. The kick of a horse at close range, a hoof flicked out in anger, is like being whacked in the shins with a baseball bat. It rips flesh and shatters human bones. You will go straight to some rural Emergency Room, and you will be in a cast by nightfall . . . if you’re lucky. The unlucky will limp for the rest of their lives.

Another little-known fact about horses is that the shape of their eyeballs makes them see human beings as six times their actual size and two or three times closer than they actually are. The multiples vary from horse to horse due to gene differentials, age, and eyeball size, but guaranteed pain awaits those who fail to grasp this bizarre truth of nature. Imagine how you would relate to your dog if you thought it was six times bigger than it actually is.

Fifty Years Later

On some days you find too much queerness in your Life. It happens suddenly—or at least it seems that way. But in truth it is like a boil bursting—an eruption of foul juices that were there all along and then suddenly erupted for many eyes to see.

And so it happened in the summer of ’94 that I found myself happily wandering the back roads of the professional polo circuit, looking for weirdness and action. It was dumb, but so what? Dumb is a nice way to travel in some neighborhoods, and on some days, just looking for action is almost as good as finding it.

In any case, I spent many scorching long afternoons last summer driving around the mountains in my old 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood Eldorado convertible, looking for signs of people who might be engaged in some off-duty polo action—a practice drill in one place, an unscheduled game in another—back and forth in the sun along dusty narrow roads, across high-mountain pastures with humming electric fences and the occasional tin-roof animal shed every two or three miles, but on weekday afternoons there was rarely any sign of human life.

Only animals, filthy stupid animals. And the rotten blazing sun. The thirst, the anger, the crippling sense of helpless bovine dumbness when you pass the same deserted barn for the third time in forty minutes and then suddenly run out of gas on a rutted uphill grade overlooking nothing . . . The nasty rush of fear when the 5,200-pound Cadillac loses its power brakes and steering as it rolls backward down the hill and almost off a cliff.

I was looking for my homeboys, the Aspen Polo team, which was rumored to be on its way to Long Island to compete in what some people said was the Super Bowl of polo, the high-goal U.S. Open. There was even talk of
winning
, prevailing, beating the best in the world on their own turf and galloping off with the prize.

I must have been bored last summer, because I became oddly fixated with the idea. As a betting proposition, it was not as goofy as it sounded. Aspen Polo turned out to be a gang of big-time polo mercenaries who looked good enough on paper to beat anybody in the world. Doug
Matthews, the mysterious aircraft-industry tycoon from Atlanta, had stunned the polo world by brazenly hiring both of the legendary Gracida brothers, Memo and Carlos, to play on the same team, along with a twenty-three-year-old hot rod out of South Carolina named Tiger Kneece, whose lame six-goal rating was rumored to be suspiciously low.

The Gracida brothers from Mexico were both world-class ten goalers. Yes. It was not a bad bet at all—and when I learned several weeks later that the tournament was already fixed, our bet looked even better.

What polo people call “gentleman’s polo” is a very different game from professional, or “high goal.” The gentleman’s version is an amateur horse sport, a kind of Rodeo for Rich Cowboys that is played all over the country by not many people at all—maybe .001 percent of the population, or even .0001 percent—and it is not a spectator sport. Less than .00001 percent of the U.S. population ever watches polo, and only 666 people have ever seen it on TV. Jai alai is a major sport compared with polo, and more people paid to watch the Calaveras County Frog Jumping Contest last summer than attended the prestigious month-long U.S. Polo Open on Long Island in September.

Polo is a sport for the filthy, aggressive rich and a handful of skilled professional horse athletes who roam the world and sell themselves to the highest bidder, often a different one each week and always for princely fees.

The people who pay these fees are called patrons, pronounced as in the Spanish:
patrones
. A patron hires his own players—or at least the other three—and he plays every minute of every chukker, no matter how useless he is. But make no mistake about it: patrons
are
polo; they pay all the bills and buy all the horses and support the high-goal players in the extravagant style of the polo world, which is the only style they know.

Patrons are a strange breed with no common bond except hubris. There are fewer than thirty of them in the world at any given time, and they travel a feverish high-dollar circuit, one that stretches from Palm Springs and Santa Barbara in the West to Palm Beach and Greenwich in the East, and then from England to France and back across the Atlantic to the pampas of Argentina, the mecca of high-goal polo all over the
world and the sacred birthplace of Belinda, the mythical four-eyed horse goddess of polo and everything it stands for.

Belinda is lewd yet friendly; she is an all-knowing, dissolute slut horse, insanely rapacious yet very inviting and maternal at the same time. She dwells alone somewhere up in the Andes, and on moonlit nights she comes down and mingles regally with normal horses and sometimes even with the gauchos. They weep and shout at the sight of her, and a few even claim to have ridden her.

Patrons are no different. They worship Belinda for many reasons, but mainly out of fear. It was Belinda who made Argentina the ruler of the polo world and the hatchery of high-goal champions. She is capricious, however, and is said to take bribes and wantonly peddle her influence from time to time.

She usually favors Argentines, but there were rumors this year that Doug Matthews got to her first. This news sent a wave of excitement through American polo circles and ignited an anti-Argie feeding frenzy among North American patrons. The cost of entering a team in this year’s U.S. Open rose to roughly $1 million, and the prize was still a bent silver cup worth less than $200. But to them it made no difference.

Eleven hard-riding patrons bit that bullet without blinking, and one of them, a mysterious black sheik from Nigeria, went so far as to “sponsor”
two
teams—which raised eyebrows here and there, but only among hard-core traditionalists. What the hell? There is nothing weird about a trainer entering two horses in the Kentucky Derby. It’s called an “entry” for betting purposes, and it’s done all the time.

The rules are different in horse sports, and brazen cheating is widely accepted as Normal. Hideous shenanigans that would get you barred from any other professional sport except dog racing are widely admired among horse people. Probably it is the legacy of Genghis Khan, who made his own rules and killed anybody who violated them.

There are many rules in polo—too many, in fact—but when it comes to the buying and selling of major championships, there are no rules at all. It is sleazier than pro wrestling and more expensive than a terminal cocaine habit, but the rich have warmly embraced it, and many have turned into addicts.

If there is any natural sport for the ’90s in America, it is polo. It is
a dangerous game ruled entirely by money and utterly without any redeeming social value. Loyalty in any form is a weakness to be jeered at, and the only thing that prevents some half-bright millionaire horse thug from buying his way to victory in the U.S. Open is ten other half-bright millionaire horse thugs who also crave to buy it and will fight to the death to prevent anyone else from winning.

A million dollars is nothing to Team Revlon or the billionaire patron Henryk de Kwiatkowski of Calumet Farm. These people fly their ponies around the world in custom-built DC-8s, luxurious airborne stables that can haul forty or fifty finely tuned horses at a time, along with fifteen or twenty grooms and usually a dozen criminal pimps on the run from Interpol or the Mafia. The polo crowd is eclectic and dangerously hagridden with narcissism and treachery, and that is the way they like it. Victory is all that matters.